High Tide is at 10:47.
The booklet says so, though the hive of activity would suggest closer to 10 on the dot. This concerned me. I wasn't sure why, phobias were a new feeling to me. Oh, I'd been afraid of things before, Mum had always laughed at telling how on the first day I'd ever seen snow, wrapped up in my full body fleece and snow boots, I'd stood on the front step shouting "snoooooo" at the top of my lungs, and then run away inside. Not to mention grass. Grass made me scream. So did walking, why walk when you could order others to do it for you? Management material Johnny had said and he was bloody right.
Though with an hour to go before high tide I didn't feel much like management.
There's a real difference between a fear and a phobia. One is rational, it can be justified, people can explain fear away, they can tell you why it's wrong to feel that way and you can accept those reasonings. Fears can be overcome with rationale - coupled with a modicum of bravery.
Phobias cannot. Phobias can be rational or irrational but ultimately phobias cannot be overcome by logic or rationale or anything that a slightly chubby 10 year old can produce.
I had a phobia of sailing in dinghies.
This is a bizarre phobia I know, and no-one could quite highlight the point at which I had started to quake at the mention of mainsails and jibs - “could it have been the fateful capsize in foot-deep water at the hands of my uncle?” - “Could it have been the night I had stayed out in the boat that rocked a little too much on the midnight tide, despite the fact that it was safely tied to the house?” - “Could it have been nothing but a random occurrence that a slightly too sensitive child, moving through life looking for a tangible fear was able to latch onto?” - It was hard to pinpoint but what was certain was this: I was terrified of sailing.
This phobia was rather complicated given my annual summer holiday arrangements. Every year my family would come up to Norfolk, a region of England renowned for rearing geese and taking great influence from the Dutch perspective on Geography. Especially though it was also quite well known for being stunningly beautiful and it was this beauty that had originally attracted my mother's early and rather extended family, the ties from which ensured that all those years late I was standing there, terrified, fists balled in worry as I looked on at the busy bodies of those around me in the kitchen of the decidedly grubby old boathouse we used as a holiday home each year.
My cousins milled around me, 15 utterly gorgeous, utterly terrifying women, screaming and laughing to one another, oblivious to my horror at the threat that bobbed in the water outside. Of course I knew that their laughter was in fact ‘cackling; as Johnny - the long time pro/antagonist of these weeks away - had informed me. As he pointed out to me in my vulnerable youth, a gathering of such women must only be described as a coven, or at the very least a gaggle. I also should point out that I also knew that they were gorgeous because Johnny had told me as much, given my age I would otherwise only have found them alien.
The terrifying part I had worked out for myself though.
Johnny himself of course was our glorious engine-oil-covered, moth-eaten-jumper wearing mephistophalis-ian circus ringmaster. One might be tricked into thinking he was an adult; his silver hair, gruff looking exterior and whip like wit was more than enough to lull you into thinking that he had in fact grown up amongst reasonable adults with reasonable views. Our parents were all reasonably convinced that's for sure and Johnny would wear his masterfully crafted mask with a comfortable ease honed over years of false adulthood. He would converse and convince and sign cross-road contracts for the sould of us cousins until one of the more adult adults decided they wanted some time away from the unwashed hoards of children and suddenly, with a cry of "don't you worry now, it’s all in safe hands" the mask would gleefuly be discarded. Away the true adults would go, beguiled by the glamour of the man they would hop in their cars and disappear over the comparatively unattractive horizon to the south and Johnny would become his true self: the Rotadile. A named steeped in legends of Johnny Rotten and crocodiles - his jumpers had holes, his arms were coated in grease, his moped roared louder than a slaughtered herd and he fed us lemonade for a breakfast so diabolical it lives in familial infamy. The Greasy John Breakfast. To a young man like myself it was the ultimate breakfast: Bacon, Bacon, Sausage, Bacon, Ketchup, Lard, Butter, Bacon, Bread, Doughnuts, Lemonade, more Lard, Black pudding, Beans and grease from the previous meal's unwashed pan made every cousin start their morning as though they had been fed rocket fuel.
Once it had been consumed though, the glow of the fat dripping from our pores reflecting off the sea borne sunlight, noisy stomachs fortified and amplified by calorie counts an Antarctic explorer would be jealous of the preparations for the days sailing would begin. It was now that a cold and inescapable fear would settle into me.
I stood in the centre of the hubbub, grease sitting heavy in my stomach, confusingly manic cousins screaming to one another as the water licked at the sides of the house, the tide risen inexorably to the point of potential use by the bathtubs we pretended were boats - them and I pretended to look active. It was terrifying to me. Not the usual fear of a thing untried, the worry that a child could quantify or manage, but the pure impulse breaking terror of homo-sapiens uncontained by modern sensibility. It wasn’t only the physical presence of the boats and water though, I was only vaguely aware of at the time, it was also terrifying that these people might see me for what I was. Amazonian women strode by me, clasping ropes, life jackets and one another, laughing and enjoying themselves. I was terrified of nothing and more terrified that they would realise this. This was their joy, to go out and have fun in a boat that would never travel faster than a brisk walk, go in water no deeper than 12ft and made me so frightened that I would quake at the mention of it. There was no rationale. I knew - I had already created a good sense of the 3rd person at this stage - I knew how to analyse my own feelings and a situations from the outside, I had learnt to rationalise and understand at least some of my emotions, yet looking at this one situation there was nothing but swirling darkness and horror to me. Phobia.
I watched as they bounded into the boats. I stepped forward, I undid knots on the quayside, I threw ropes down to boats, I watched as they beckoned to me and I hopped from foot to foot in anxiety. They wanted me to join them, these wonder women, my family, my parents and brother didn't give a damn how I felt to their absolute credit. They wanted me to share their joy, and I was desperate to do so. Yet there was a barrier so powerful in mental anguish that it was almost physical to me, a block between me and those bath-tub boats and I could not hurdle it and so I cried and... I was ten, I did frustrated ten year old things.
So I stood on the dock and watched, as I had for years. I stomped and I sobbed and I worried.
What I did was wait until my grandmother took my hand, as she had done before and hot tears fell down my face in my frustration. She didn't mind though, she offered the view that it was the sensible thing to do in fact, the option she always preferred, you see we were the walking party, we had the crucial job of taking the picnics to where the boats would be, we were critical to the operations of the day she assured me. We were the support party. We were content with our role in the day, happy together.
The causeway snaked away in front of us, hugging the tidal creek at some points and at some points rebelling from it to visit the marshland. Marshes that teemed with life.
It's a cliché to say but teeming is beyond accurate. Flocks of geese, ducks of varieties previously unseen beyond these particular spaces, insects as big as invading bombers, nature at its most raw and unendingly gorgeous. My gran pointed them out to me as we went, a healthy love and fearof nature showing them all off to me in their beauty and fury. It made walking feel like it wasn't the cowards option despite the overwhelming views that I perceived the rest of the family had. We walked and watched as the sails went by. We walked as my cousins and my brother shouted and laughed their way through the creek, the shallow waters and close coasts a place of play and joy to them.
I walked and my grandmother walked with me, held my hand and chatted easily to the scared child I was. It was easy for us all to miss that the reason that all these cousins so closely resembled a tribe of mythical warrior women was because they were descended from the lady that held my hand, our warrior queen, our original influence.
I was young but she never saw that. I was worried, tender and hurt by my fear and she didn't let it phase her. I walked the causeway and she held my hand because I needed her to and because she loved me. We walked, we spoke about the plethora of colours in the sky, growing my appetite for language and natural beauty. We spoke about which plants the caterpillars liked, honing in on a shared love and fascination of the natural world. We laughed about which cousin would capsize next, taking joy in our family that we both loved so dearly. At no point was I talking to someone who considered herself my superior as an adult and at no point did she act as though she was talking to a child. We were just talking to each other. We walked together for years, over sand, mud, creekwater and and left abject terror behind us. She held my hand for the years that we provided picnics, the years we were the excited audience for the sailing stories, secretly relieved that we hadn't had to deal with the excitement ourselves.
On one such afternoon, much like the rest, we had arrived at the Grey Goose, an ancient wooden caravan that had long ago swapped its wheels for a floating platform so that now it rose with the water from the sand and settled with the tides. It was a perfect picnic spot.
The sailors had come in and us walkers were just joining. Sandwiches (featuring actual sand) were being eaten, Johnny had managed to rally enough bedraggled looking crewmen and women that day to handle even the most woodwormy of boats with a sharkish grin and we sunned ourselves in the half-uncovered sunlight that Norfolk offered us that day, pushing our hands into the warm, fine sand.
Me and my gran were happily engaging some cousins in conversation when the call to man the boats home came along with the ominous changing of tides and they suddenly jumped to life, forgetting what I had thought to have been a fascinating chat about samphire. The familiar feeling sat in my stomach then. Dread is unfair, fear is too light, coldness is most accurate. Just cold worry at the thought of leaving on anything but my own feet. As ever I reasoned with myself: "you’re a great swimmer, you just got your 50 metre Frosties badge!" I thought, "every other cousin is doing it, you’ll just be left out again if you stay" and "your eight-year-old brother is right now standing on the helm of a boat pretending to be a pirate!"
It doesn’t matter. Irrational fear is irrational, a phobia to a child is as insurmountable as Everest is to hamster. That coldness held me regardless of how I wanted to react. I turned from the boats, ready to walk away.
"Come on" said a confident voice and I felt my hand held tightly. There was no 'shall we?' There was no "What do you think?" She held my hand. My Gran, who had walked with me to take care of me, held my hand and walked me to the boats. I probably cried. I was probably terrified but as I looked at my gran, someone who I had learnt to trust implicitly taking me by the hand I felt a resolve that wasn’t my own. I saw Johnny in his boat, he was positively beaming at me, the tears on my face seemingly absent as I walked to up to the creaking planks of the ancient crabber. I was terrified, inside I was screaming but I walked, blood rushing in my ears. They both smiled at me and my gran squeezed my hand as the sail snapped taught before I had noticed that I was on board.
She was fearful too I could tell. Her knuckles were white against the running board, her gaze glanced back and forth in worry, from cousin to slipping knot to worried looking grandson to mainsail to jib and back. But then her gaze would pass to Johnny, the Rotadile. She wouldn't relax, I'm not sure she could on a boat, but the boat would accommodate her then. Their eyes would meet and the boat would sigh. It would stop fighting the wind. The waves would stop slapping the sides and rather they would crickle along with the hull, encouraging them home. There was between the two of them an understanding, one that then was understood by the seas, the tide, by the wood of the boat, by the very nature around them.
I didn’t sit still once on that journey home . I was ordered here there and everywhere by Johnny or a cousin or grabbed by my Gran as we wen through a rough patch. I had years of walking to make up for and Johnny was prepared to make me run a marathon's worth of jobs as the wind pulled us on. On a boat that was less than 14 ft long this was impressive but I did it though, without complaint and more surprisingly without tears.
I was made to feel important. I stood between this piece of wood and fibreglass and the icy depths (though those depths were about thigh deep). I held the tiller, I controlled the mainsail, pulled the jib, pulled this piece of rope through that piece of rope, grabbed an anchor that may or may not have been attached. I was the first mate, I was Pirate Jack, I was in fact almost home when I remembered that I had my terror. It was a physical reaction, as it came back in a wave during a lull in the various pulling tasks set by my skipper and I became pale as it hit me. I felt it surge over me and I turned in horror behind me, looking to the coast, not even 15 metres away from me. I looked for one face then, that of my gran, who smiled at me when we locked eyes as the fear passed over me and washed through me. I grabbed a random lever and pulled it - despite the unplanned change of direction this caused Johnny complimented me with good nature on my seaworthiness and we bashed heavily into the side.
I dismounted the boat with a splash, took the mooring rope and tied a perfect figure of eight to the quayside. There was no pomp and circumstance, no celebration, my parents smiled to themselves and moved on and I stood knee deep and flecked in creek mud, grinning. My Gran stepped from the boat and took my hand, my other clasping the mooring rope, just in case.
"I'm so proud of you" she said, wiping a spot of mud from my chin.
"It's alright, I've got the rope here!" I replied with an adrenaline fuelled bluster.
"Well done darling" She said with a smile warmer than the cooked sand of the beach we’d left as the hordes of cousins disembarked around me. Johnny smiled to see it and I grinned to be a part of it as she squeezed my hand just a little bit tighter.
